Albums of the Year 2024 - Number 74

Over the years, Bonny Light Horseman has accumulated many miles on the collective odometer of life. The band’s core trio – Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman – has amassed an incomparable collected resume. Mitchell is a celebrated solo artist as well as the playwright and songwriter behind the hit Broadway musical Hadestown, which notched eight Tony Awards and a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album. Johnson is best known as the mind behind beloved indie mainstays Fruit Bats, as a longtime collaborator with The Shins, and as a film score composer. And Kaufman is a multi-hyphenate extraordinaire: songwriter, producer, and position player, having recorded and performed with artists ranging from Bob Weir to The War on Drugs to Taylor Swift, Hiss Golden Messenger and The Hold Steady. As a group, Bonny Light Horseman’s debut album received a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album, and the track "Deep in Love" was nominated for Best American Roots Performance.

More important than any of this, though, they’ve also lived a big ol’ messy and tangled up pile of life, and all that living permeates their music with the wisdom, humor, and depth that underlies the accolades. Theirs is the stuff that defines folk music as a genre: love and loss, hope and sorrow, community and family, change and time. The Big Stuff, with the stakes sky high.

At the center of Bonny Light Horseman is, always, the singular combination of three powerful and tender artists, artists who expertly dodge superlatives but are quick to acknowledge that their bond makes each one better, braver and more vulnerable than they’d be on their own. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the force of their voices together, which work with complete trust in one another through the gentlest moments and the most ruthless wails.

Bonny Light Horseman’s new album, Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free, is an ode to the blessed mess of our humanity. Confident and generous, it is an unvarnished offering that puts every feeling and supposed flaw out in the open. The themes are stacked high and staked even higher: love and loss, hope and sorrow, community and family, change and time all permeate Bonny Light Horseman’s most vulnerable and bounteous offering to date. Yet for all of its humanistic touchpoints, Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free was forged from a kind of unexplainable magic.